About the AuthorMike Elgan

Google wants you to keep using Google. So to keep your interest, it’s working hard to apply some of the world’s most advanced technologies to making your online activities faster and easier.It’s attacking from several angles. One of them is predicti…

Technology changes fast.With each new change, employees are forced to adapt. That process of adapting is painful — physically and psychologically.That’s why we seem to get a new health problem related to technology every few years.I want to tell you…

Self-driving cars and trucks are everywhere, it seems. Especially in the news.We were inundated this week with media reports about huge progress on the autonomous vehicle front.The press reported that Google — I mean Waymo — ordered “thousands” of m…

Apple likes to change the world.The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the launch of the iPad in 2010 mainstreamed touchscreen phones and tablets, respectively. That was world-changing.This change took place via products Apple makes — “computers…

A few years ago, chatbots were supposed to take over as a leading way to interact with the internet. They would live on our phones and in our messaging apps. Whenever we needed anything, all we had to do was type out a question.Things are turning ou…

Have you ever wished you could clone yourself? Imagine how much you could accomplish.The future of A.I. will make something kind of like that possible. By scanning your face and voice and observing how you talk and what you know, future A.I. could b…

If we learned anything in 2017, it’s this: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.You may have heard, for example, that Google is preparing a new unified operating system to replace Chrome OS (the operating system that powers Chromebooks)…

I’m putting the liars on notice.The most underappreciated application for the combination of augmented reality (A.R.) and artificial intelligence (A.I.) is persistent lie detection.Smartphones and smart glasses will soon support apps that show you i…

Smartphones are supercomputers.Or, at least, they’re significantly more powerful than supercomputers were ten years ago. And way more powerful than desktops were five years ago.Smartphones also offer killer benefits that laptops don’t — namely, long…

The world of security is getting super weird. And the solutions may be even weirder than the threats.I told you last week that some of the biggest companies in technology have been caught deliberately introducing potential vulnerabilities into mobil…

Your smartphone may contain secret “features” that leave you vulnerable.I’m not talking about accidental design flaws that hackers might exploit. Security issues have always existed. They represent a cat-and-mouse game between malicious actors, who …

Star Trek got it right.In the future, we’ll interact with computers mostly by talking.But for those computers to be available for instant interaction, they’ll have to be attached to our physical persons. I’m talking about virtual assistants on weara…

Will smart glasses fog when I drink my morning coffee?So many questions about the future of smart glasses remain unanswered.As we slouch toward the end of the smartphone era, it’s important to consider what comes next — and plan accordingly.Here are…

Apple’s new iPhone X reads faces. And privacy pundits are gnashing their teeth over it.The phone’s complex TrueDepth image system includes an infrared projector, which casts 30,000 invisible dots, and an infrared camera, which checks where in three-…

Apple’s shiny new iPhone X smartphone became available for pre-order on FridayPacked with both bells and whistles and dominating the field in both speeds and feeds, Apple’s hotly anticipated iPhone X will be considered by some to be the world’s grea…

Apple’s shiny new iPhone X smartphone became available for pre-order on FridayPacked with both bells and whistles and dominating the field in both speeds and feeds, Apple’s hotly anticipated iPhone X will be considered by some to be the world’s grea…

If you read the business headlines, it sounds like brick-and-mortar retail stores are dying – a so-called “retail apocalypse.”Around 8,600 stores could close in the U.S. this year, according to a report from brokerage firm Credit Suisse.Some even sp…

Ho-hum. Another year, another crop of amazing smartphones.The latest advancements come from Apple and Google. The new iPhone 8 line and iPhone X phones, as well as Google’s new Pixel phones, are blistering fast, offer near-DSLR-quality cameras and p…

Google held a big hardware event this week, announcing a couple of new Pixel-branded smartphones, two Google Home devices, a new Pixelbook laptop, new earbuds called Pixel Buds, and a consumer camera called Google Clips.Of all the new Google product…

“Information wants to be free.”That was the motto of truth-seeking digital activists in the ’80s and ’90s.The motto today is: “Information wants to be fake.”Just look at the news this week for a glimpse of how much chaos fake news is causing.Faceboo…

Apple has now rolled out its shiny new iPhones.On Sept. 12, Apple executives predictably pronounced the latest phones “revolutionary.” But the real revolution is happening under the surface and behind the scenes.The new iPhones come with cutting-edg…

But when Yahoo and IBM famously banned telecommuting, some assumed the trend toward increasing work-from-home policies would be thrown into reverse. That assumption is a big mistake.

The telecommuting trend will continue. More than that: Companies will be increasingly forced to allow employees to work from outside the office. This trend obviously has major implications for security and management.

InfoTrends says people will take 1.2 trillion digital photos this year. That’s 100 billion more than last year and nearly double the number taken as recently as 2013.The rate at which photo taking grows is currently clocked at a whopping 100 billion…

Smartwatches failed as a product category because the main industry players made a huge mistake.They started with consumer smartwatches and treated the enterprise as an afterthought. It should have been the other way around.Three years ago, smartwat…

Smartwatches failed as a product category because the main industry players made a huge mistake.They started with consumer smartwatches and treated the enterprise as an afterthought. It should have been the other way around.Three years ago, smartwat…

Instead of fearing that artificial intelligence (A.I.) will replace us, we should be excited about how A.I. will help us.

In a perfect future, our A.I. virtual assistant will know what we’re doing, where we’re going and — most importantly — what we’re saying. They’ll know lots of other things, too. And when they sense we need help, they’ll whisper suggestions, ideas or facts into our ears, essentially giving us real-time knowledge as we go about our day.

As you’re walking from a parking garage to your meeting, your virtual assistant should give you turn-by-turn walking directions without you having to ask. As you shake hands before the meeting, your virtual assistant should remind you (without anyone else hearing), that you met the person four years ago at a conference. During the meeting, it should listen for potential questions and supply the answer.